Square

I like to think about positioning as the internal facing framework of how you want your sellers to perceive, understand and feel about your product. Positioning informs your messaging. It can reflect the vision for your product, key differentiators, and defines what your product is. Messaging is external facing - how your positioning comes to life with the actual messaging in the market. The key value props that are compelling to your customers can be thematic while the messaging itself is how the value prop is communicated externally.  

It is always a good idea to factor in some time for research pre-launch to make sure your messaging is resonating with your target customer. In the past, I've done this both via quant surveys (Pros: more data driven confidence levels but Cons: Finding the right prospect audience can be expensive) and qual (Pros: can learn more of the why and insights, Cons: lower levels of confidence). Another useful tactic is to loop in your GTM teams early on to get their thoughts on concepts/messaging. But ultimately, you shouldn't use these as a crutch, you should invest more energy and time up front to...

Ongoing: Google alerts to get pushed industry and/or competitive content, subscribing to your competitors lead gen lists, reading earnings call transcripts. From existing customers, (SAM teams can help here a lot!) understand who is churning and where are they switching, or any complementary products being used to fill your own product gaps.  Quarterly deep dive to see if there is anything critical that needs to change about your own GTM strategy, internal or external comms.

Like any good marketer, it's about knowing your end customer and how they would like to consume information. All sales teams are different and finding the right communication methods (format, frequency) is important to align on up front so that you can focus your energy on being efficient and effective. Here are some tips: 1. More is not always more - sometimes we might over correct for a lack of data/deliverables by creating information overload. Sometimes teams like sales might not "actually read and use it" because it's 1 of 100 things they are trying to absorb. Take a look at what piec...

This is a great question. Overall, product differentiation is key and one of the roles I really enjoy within PMM is having such a pulse and influence on what differentiates your product in the market - but it's not enough to just be different, it needs to matter to your customer and it needs to come to life in your marketing. This makes me think about my time at Old Navy where denim was our largest product category year over year. (Stick with me, this will translate to tech too, I promise). There are countless options for jeans and within the value fashion category, a few key competitors we...

Some key documents that my teams have implemented for competitive positioning are starting with data gathering on points such as: key value props, feature set, target customers, pricing, strengths, customer perception. Partnering with brand and demand gen teams on creative campaign insights and media spend are also helpful to coordinate on. These inputs can then be inputs into frameworks like SWOT matrixes and battlecards for Sales/AM teams or internal one sheeters that can be good alignment collateral across product and marketing.  

All the time! It is so critical for PMM teams to talk to customers to understand their pain points, their jobs to be done, their delighters, motivations, etc. It's also important for GTM teams to have a pulse on customer feedback via customer success, sales and account management in order to understand potential barriers or blind spots that you may have from a PMM perspective. But it's not just enough to have a consistent flow of insights and information - it's really important to synthesize all of these datapoints into the "so what" -- the key themes that inform either product improvements...

When product marketing is embedded in the product team, we share learnings on an ongoing, organic basis through a variety of team rituals - daily stand-ups, sprint retros, demos, etc. If product marketing is running a specific research project, we typically share the research plan and early draft of discussion guide or survey questions with the rest of the product team (product manager, designer, engineering manager, etc.) so the research design benefits from cross-functional perspectives. We then distill learnings and synthesize into actionable next steps that we align on with the team....

Customer needs and feedback are fundamental drivers of product strategy, prioritization, and roadmapping. It’s also important to align on goals for the business to ensure all teams are working toward the same outcomes. If product management is seeking to expand the addressable market while product marketing wants to increase penetration in an existing market - it will of course be more difficult to align on which feedback matters most! Once goals are aligned, framing specific customer feedback in terms of impact to the business can really help with influencing stakeholders and aligning prio...

While the working relationship between product marketing and sales and success may depend on how the organization is structured, these teams provide crucial insights into customer needs regardless of where they sit. At Square PMMs are embedded in product teams and sales and success sit in different parts of the org. PMMs are responsible for representing the voice of the customer in product development and sales and success teams provide critical inputs into that voice. It’s really helpful to have an established, measurable feedback loop with those teams to understand how certain feedback...